Word: wordsmiths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much freer will Chancellor be to speak his piece as commentator? That too is something of a neuter craft. Even as gifted a wordsmith and observer as Sevareid could, on days when his brow was furrowed but his mind only half engaged, sound merely sententious. As the CBS News code defines the job, the analyst is "to help the listener to understand, to weigh and to judge, but not to do the judging for him . . . the audience should be left with no impression as to which side the analyst himself actually favors...
Nabokov is a brilliant wordsmith and an impressive artificer. If that were enough, Look at the Harlequins! would be a very good book, and as it is, little nabokovs will find it entertaining and, often, funny. Others may find it empty--Nabokov's narrator takes a poke at "readers who are all head," but there is not much pleasure for the heart in this book...
...Safire thinks that he has made the best of a bad situation: "If I defend the President, I'm an apologist. If I attack him, I'm a traitor. If I ignore the whole thing, I'm a cop-out." Deservedly known as a wit and wordsmith during his years as an Administration speechwriter, Safire has kept his sense of humor throughout the ordeal, although his neologisms ("presibuster" for the Ervin hearings, "probephiliacs" for those investigating Watergate) are shorter on style than many of his admirers had expected. One of his more inventive efforts was a savagely...
...distinguished career. The prevailing waltz meter is more suggestive of fin de siècle Vienna than the Scandinavian north, but why carp? In a show almost without choreography, Sondheim's lyrics are nimble-wilted dances. Literate, ironic, playful, enviably clever, altogether professional, Stephen Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons (Gingold), a lament that courtesans are not the elegantly larcenous creatures they used to be. Equally arresting are Send In the Clowns (Johns), a rueful gaze into the cracked mirror...
Eloquent Ideologue. No, it is not an easy job to shepherd the flock following the wordsmith who, in his glacial contempt for newsmen, has included them among the "nattering nabobs of negativism." Says one Agnew intimate: "If someone were to advise the Vice President to close down his press office, leaving only a girl to answer the phone and say 'F- you' to every query, Agnew would be perfectly agreeable...